✕
Economics need to change - now more than ever! With Exploring Economics, we strengthen alternative economic approaches and counter mainstream economics with a critical and pluralistic vision of economic education. We also provide background analyses on current economic debates to strengthen a critical economic discourse.
Unfortunately, we are running out of money to continue our work.
With a small contribution you can help Exploring Economics to stay online. Thank you!
We are a registered non-profit organization | Bank account: Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V., IBAN: DE91 4306 0967 6037 9737 00, SWIFT-BIC: GENODEM1GLS | Imprint
476 results
In this essay, the author takes a critical perspective on the pursuit of growth as the solution for providing for environmental sustainability and economic stability in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Drawing from the framework of dependency theory and presenting brief insights into European core-periphery relations the author then argues for the implementation of an alternative strategy to development that is built around the concept of self-reliance.
Dependency in Central and Eastern Europe - Self-reliance and the need to move beyond economic growth
Capitalism is dissolving boundaries - not only in the sense of ever-expanding global trade flows, but also in the concrete everyday working lives of individuals. What implications does this have for our understanding of freedom, work and borders?
Capitalism & Boundaries
Feminist economics focuses on the interdependencies of gender relations and the economy. Care work and the partly non-market mediated reproduction sphere are particularly emphasised by feminist economics.
Feminist Economics
The goal of this course is to explore these differences in economic outcomes observed among women and men, measured by such things as earnings, income, hours of work, poverty, and the allocation of resources within the household. It will evaluate women’s perspectives and experiences in the United States and around the world, emphasizing feminist economics.
Economics of Gender
As seen with the United Nations significant promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the past few years, the issue of global development is of growing concern to many international organizations. As humanity continues to become more interconnected through globalization, the inequalities and injustices experienced by inhabitants of impacted countries becomes increasingly clear. While this issue can be observed in the papers of different types (e.g., different schools of thought) of economists throughout the world, the work of behavioral and complexity economists offer a unique, collaborative perspective on how to frame decisions for individuals in a way that can positively reverberate throughout society and throughout time.
Behavioural vs Complexity Economics: Approaches to Development
Derek Neal writes that economists must analyze public education policy in the same way they analyze other procurement problems. He shows how standard tools from economics research speak directly to issues in education. For mastering the models and tools that economists of education should use in their work, there is no better resource available.--
Information, Incentives, and Education Policy
Understanding gender inequality is possible only when looking at the intersections between race and class inequalities. The health crisis is no different: Stevano takes a feminist and social reproductive perspective, from unpaid household work to social infrastructure and services.
The Feminist Economics of Covid-19
Lean Logic is the late David Fleming’s masterpiece, the product of more than thirty years’ work and a testament to the creative brilliance of one of Britain’s most important intellectuals. A dictionary unlike any other, it leads readers through Fleming’s stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, being made up of four hundred and four engaging essay-entries covering topics such as Boredom, Community, Debt, Growth, Harmless Lunatics, Land, Lean Thinking, Nanotechnology, Play, Religion, Spirit, Trust, and Utopia. The threads running through every entry are Fleming’s deft and original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations—ecological, economic, and cultural— on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences
Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
As the current economic crisis spreads around the globe questions are being asked about what king of capitalist or post-capitalist economy will follow. There is increasing talk of the need for stringent economic regulation, the need to temper greed and individualism, to make the economy work for human and social development.
The Social Economy
Aim of this intensive workshop is 1.) to introduce the participants to the macroeconomic workings of the climate crisis as the background of sustainable finance; 2.) to introduce financial assets with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria attached to them and their markets and important institutional players; 3.) to provide a critical perspective on the current setup of sustainable finance; 4.) and to work on in-depth case studies illustrating the workings on ESG-finance markets, its emitters and traders as well as their macroeconomic implications.
Sustainable Finance – Hoax or necessity. A global perspective
In this book, distinguished economist Edith Kuiper shows us that the history of economic thought is just that, a his-story, by telling the herstory of economic thought from the perspective of women economic writers and economists. Although some of these women were well known in their time, they were excluded from most of academic economics, and, over the past centuries, their work has been neglected, forgotten, and thus become invisible.
A Herstory of Economics
According to Karl Marx, work should satisfy people and encourage creativity. But the capitalist production, the separation of labour and the exploitation of workers alienates them from their products.
Karl Marx on Alienation
The video gives a short explanation of Max Weber's treatment of the protestant work ethic as the explanatory factor for the development of capitalism.
An Introduction to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic - A Macat Sociology Analysis
Multimedia dossier on unpaid labor (featuring the UK statistics office unpaid work calculator), migrant care labor and feminist political economy more generally.
Housework – I-PEEL.org
What is the working class under present circumstances and in particular in urban lives? David Harvey explains how the concept of the working class is still suitable for the current organization of work – even if working conditions changed, now being more service-oriented and diffused. Harvey further discusses how this diffused working class can organize via urban neighbourhoods.
The Revolutionary Class Today
How was money actually invented? Where does it come from? In this first episode of a video lecture, Dirk Bezemer from the University of Groningen presents the origins of money and how it's related to debt. It's a basic historical review and you can get an idea of how money is created and how banks work. The following episodes aim at giving an overview of the last debt crisis.
DEBT episode 1: Debt, a great invention
What is money and how does it work? The short film reveals common misunderstandings of where money comes from, explains how money is created by banks and presents consequences of money as credit. The video is part of the campaign positive money, promoting the democratic control over money creation.
What is money?
Does Karl Polanyi's work “The Great Transformation” serve to analyse the current multiple crisis and social movements? Nancy Fraser revises Polanyi's concept of a double movement to capture social forces in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the 1930s – on the one side marketization and on the other hand social protection. Fraser proposes to talk about a triple movement and to account for emancipatory struggles. In the lecture, she discusses interactions as well as conflicts between those three forces, in particular conflicting aims of social protection. The lecture presents the content of her paper “A TRIPLE MOVEMENT? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi“ in the New Left Review (2013).
Crisis of Capitalism, Crisis of Governance: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century
In this lecture Mirowski claims that a good critique of and alternative to neoclassical economics should focus on microeconomics. In addition, he claims that mainstream economics is not about a specific "human nature", instead the understanding of markets (partially based on Hayek) is of special importance. As an alternative Mirowski proposes institutionalist economics that builds upon how markets work nowadays (e.g. links to computer science).
Should Economists be Experts in Markets or in Human Nature?
Paul Mason presents the main arguments of his book PostCapitalism. First, he argues that capitalism runs out of its capability to adapt to crises and second states that information technology challenges the capitalist system. In a nutshell, he argues that a society which fully exploits information technologies can't include concepts such as intellectual property, free market or private ownership. This has far-reaching consequences for the organisation of wages and work. The talk stops at minute 37.30.
The Future of Capitalism
How does fiscal policy work and which dimensions have to be considered? In this short text, you can learn about the difficulty of juggling different dimensions and which optimal rules exist at the micro and macro level.
Why is fiscal policy so difficult?
Most mainstream neoclassical economists completely failed to anticipate the crisis which broke in 2007 and 2008. There is however a long tradition of economic analysis which emphasises how growth in a capitalist economy leads to an accumulation of tensions and results in periodic crises. This paper first reviews the work of Karl Marx who was one of the first writers to incorporate an analysis of periodic crisis in his analysis of capitalist accumulation. The paper then considers the approach of various subsequent Marxian writers, most of whom locate periodic cyclical crises within the framework of longer-term phases of capitalist development, the most recent of which is generally seen as having begun in the 1980s. The paper also looks at the analyses of Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Claire Mitchell, two US institutionalist economists who stressed the role of finance and its contribution to generating periodic crises, and the Italian Circuitist writers who stress the problematic challenge of ensuring that bank advances to productive enterprises can successfully be repaid.
Finance and Crisis: Marxian, Institutionalist and Circuitist approaches
This paper surveys the development of the concept of socialism from the French Revolution to the socialist calculation debate. Karl Marx’s politics of revolutionary socialism led by an empowered proletariat nurtured by capital accumulation envisions socialism as a “top-down” system resting on political institutions, despite Marx’s keen appreciation of the long-period analysis of the organization of social production in the classical political economists. Collectivist thinking in the work of Enrico Barone and Wilfredo Pareto paved the way for the discussion of socialism purely in terms of the allocation of resources. The Soviet experiment abandoned the mixed economy model of the New Economic Policy for a political-bureaucratic administration of production only loosely connected to theoretical concepts of socialism. The socialist calculation debate reductively recast the problem of socialism as a problem of allocation of resources, leading to general equilibrium theory. Friedrich Hayek responded to the socialist calculation debate by shifting the ground of discussion from class relations to information revelation
Socialist alternatives to capitalism I: Marx to Hayek
The Money View Symposium was hosted by YSI on 5-7 February, 2021. The Symposium showcased the work of scholars and practitioners that make use of the so-called Money View, ranging from economists to lawyers, politicians and social scientists at large. The symposium aims to illuminate the main tenets of the Money View and to demonstrate its juxtaposition to the mainstream.
Money View Symposium 2021
In this podcast, Nalia Kabeer talks about her work, criticising the way in which Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) is adopted as a sole form of impact assessment. At the beginning of the talk, she briefly describes The Ultra Poor Project (the context of her study), RCTs and its critiques (such as lack of acknowledgement of human agency, heterogeneity, and social context); also, the problem that most RCTs practitioners do not allow for qualitative research conducted in an integrated way as it might cause their studies “being contaminated.”
Naila Kabeer on Why Randomized Controlled Trials need to include Human Agency
This archive contains open access copies of most of the written work, including the books of Karl William Kapp (1910-1976) was one of the forefathers of Ecological Economics.
K. William Kapp archive
In this class we will explore how globalization shapes and is shaped by gender norms with a particular focus on questions related to ‘work,’ mobility and well-being.
Gender and Globalization
The book provides an excellent comparative perspective on New Keynesian "New Consensus" economics and Post-Keynesian Economics at a beginner level. It also offers an interactive tool to understand how the economic models work, especially from a heterodox / pluralist perspective.
Introduction to Macroeconomics: Pluralist and Interactive
In this lecture, Sanjay Reddy reviews the work of János Kornai, especially his critique of the socialist system, which is rooted in his understanding of the eminently political character of socialism.
János Kornai's Critique of the Socialist System
Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapely won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on market design back in 2012, but it is a field that is still underrepresented in economics education. All markets have rules, and how these rules are set influence how the market functions.
The economics of legalising cannabis
The 2022 FIFA World Cup (including the construction work required for it) provides a clear example of economic activity that has taken place despite the financial costs to the Qatari state being an order of magnitude larger than the financial benefits it will receive. Whilst this is a fairly extreme case in terms of how many different costs and benefits are involved and how unequally they have been spread, many economic decisions are more complicated than mere financial calculations and it is therefore vital for students to be able to think about multiple dimensions involved in economic decisions.
The Economics of a World Cup in Qatar
The Nawi Knowledge Portal is an open access repository that features for multi themed research outputs and knowledge products. They aim to amplify the work of African women working to demystify the space of macroeconomic policy from a Pan African feminist to the widest possible audience.
NAWI Collective - A Pan African Feminist Political Economy Collective
We use cookies on our website. Click on Accept to help us to make Exploring Economics constantly better!